I am taking a two day course this week on Unit Testing, Test Driven Development, and Refactoring put on by Net Objectives . Our instructor, Rob Myers, has a fair amount of experience working as an Extreme Programming coach. In an interesting twist to...

I spent last week out in Redmond visiting Microsoft headquarters. I usually make it out a couple times a year and have a full week of meeting with different people. While I never specifically go out to talk about Agile development and Scrum, quite a bit...

The concept of the Scrum Daily Meeting is really quite simple. All that each person needs to do is answer the three simple questions (What have you done? What do you plan to do? What impediments do you have?) and everybody is back to work in 15 minutes...

Setting Sprint Goals My DevDiv counterpart, Chris Flaat , recently had a post on their Sprint 5 Planning . He ends the post with a discussion on goal setting for a sprint. This is a topic that we've struggled with in our teams' Scrum planning, so it’s...

The bridges have been broken, and egos have been bolstered or bruised as appropriate. Here’s a recap of Bridge Breaking Night. The bridges in the competition The bridge test stand. Sand flowed from the bucket on top to the hanging “bucket” below. With...

In my last post , I told you about Archie – my bridge for the bridge building contest tomorrow night. I want to tell you a little bit about my development process for Archie in this post and see if it sounds familiar. Armed with some basic tools and skills...

It’s time for Archie to come out of the closet, …. err, workshop. Who is Archie? Archie is the name of my bridge for the bridge building contest that I recently blogged about. With the competition coming up tomorrow, I think it’s safe to talk about Archie...

One of my co-workers decided to have a bridge building contest. Why, you might ask? I’m not exactly sure myself, but nevertheless, several of us decided it was a worthy endeavor and signed up to participate. The parts list is as follows: · 3’ ¼ round...

When we started with Scrum a year ago, we decided that our sprints should work on the calendar month. Specifically, the sprint ended on the last Thursday of the month and started the following Monday. That means some sprints were 4 weeks and some were...